Video Streaming over Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a proposed future Internet architecture that offers many advantages over TCP/IP, and holds significant promise for content distribution applications, such as video streaming. The TCP/IP architecture assigns IP addresses to hosts, making the Internet essentially a point-to-point communication system. NDN allows data consumers to retrieve desired content by directly using application-specified hierarchical data names, enabling a general-purpose distribution system. This approach, in combination with NDN’s per-packet content signatures, permits any node in the network to cache named data packets and respond to requests for them. This is in sharp contrast to the current IP Internet, wherein a video producer sends data packets directly to every viewer, even when multiple viewers are watching the same video at the same time, and even when those consumers share the same upstream routers where the data could be easily cached.